Who Speaks for Britain?
Fashionable ideologies trump making decisions that put the public first
Towering Columns
For The Telegraph, Robert Tombs says that we have an unpatriotic establishment that is unwilling to put the national interest first.
A large section of the establishment appears not to put the national interest first. They seem not to have – as the Victorians would have put it – “a stake in the country”. Their priorities are not those of most voters. They have been moulded by globalisation, multiculturalism and postmodernism. National pride and “populism” are their enemies. Net-zero, mass immigration, and the Chagos Islands project are the fatal flowering of their mentality.
Every establishment eventually fails and falls, and we may be nearing that point now. Certainly there will be a fight, as always. That is what the “culture wars” are about. I hope readers will not mind my referring, not for the first time, to George Orwell’s essay of 1941, when he wrote that England was like “a family with the wrong members in control”. Orwell could then be confident that the strength of traditional loyalties was “vast” compared with new loyalties. We shall find out over the next few years whether that is still true.
Are we still a family, and are those in control still members of it? That depends whether we can change our present establishment, or whether it will succeed in changing us.
In The Times, Juliet Samuel warns that the government has politicised the energy grid putting our energy supply at risk.
Then again, under Ed Miliband’s plans, wind and solar are meant to account for well over half of power generation by 2030, like in Spain. And there are those whistleblowers. They have made three claims, according to Coutinho. First, the grid wasn’t managed correctly during the June heatwave; second, records about its operation are being kept in live documents that get edited without a record, so you wouldn’t necessarily be able to reconstruct what happened (or released it under FoI) if something did go wrong; and third, the body’s lobbyists are meddling in its operations to protect its reputation.
The grid operator is supposedly independent, though it was nationalised by Labour 18 months ago. But even before that, energy experts noticed that its forecasts about the cost and design of the net-zero grid seemed to be rather more supportive of the government than others are. For example, whereas Neso suggests the cost of a “clean power” system might be £200 billion over five years, the Royal Society estimates a true “clean power” system could cost up to £400 billion, without including full grid upgrades. That’s to cover things like cabling, transformers, redundancy, energy storage, AI power management systems, cyber-defences and so on.
It is obvious why a government committed to the notion that net zero is “the cheap way to go” (Miliband’s words) would want to gloss over these costs. But the Iberian blackout shows what happens when you go too fast and cut corners. Ministers, officials, Ofgem, Neso: they’ve all been warned. Political power is a nice thing, but electric power is governed only and always by the laws of physics.
For The Telegraph, Julian Jessop says that the case for wealth taxes simply does not stack up.
The UK already raises more from wealth-related taxes than any other OECD economy. There is overwhelming evidence that higher taxes on wealth are anti-growth and that they could even reduce government revenues. There are good reasons why so many other countries have abandoned them.
Mercifully, we may now be at “peak Gary”. Stevenson’s documentary has been widely panned, and he has hinted that he is done. But other social media influencers will surely emerge to fill the gap.
There is an unhealthy appetite for this sort of slop. Many polls suggests that a “wealth tax” would be popular, even when voters are faced with the reality that it is unlikely to raise any money. Other “bash the rich” policies are similarly popular, including caps on executive pay and the equalisation of capital gains and income tax. Sadly, it is much easier to look for villains to blame than it is to do the hard work to understand the real problems – and how to fix them.
In The Critic, Dominic Adler writes that the government’s policing reforms will encourage social work over public safety.
Labour is instinctively drawn to bringing police into local authority orbit — in which they traditionally have considerable power. In fact, Mahmood’s policing reforms remind me of Labour’s devolution experiment. Given their dominance of big-city local government, as they once enjoyed parliamentary seats in the Celtic fringe, Labour once gambled on devolution delivering a cunning form of eternal control. How did that work out? The SNP’s legacy of censoriousness, cancelled ferries, men in prisons and dodgy camper vans speaks for itself…
As evidence of working inside local government became a sure-fire route to promotion, did officers develop the same Guardianista groupthink as their town hall colleagues? Of course they did. Now, a cohort of senior coppers possesses identikit progressive views. At this point, Robert Conquest’s second law of politics seems apposite. The apogee of such systems failure was the rape gangs scandal and the West Midlands Police / Maccabi Tel Aviv affair. Both represent police forces effectively colluding with rotten boroughs, either ordered or influenced by local councillors. Imagine, under Mahmood’s new policing model, micro-police forces in bed with Green or “Gaza Independent” led authorities?
This is the model Mahmood, knowingly or not, is proposing. Mandarins and spads, wedded a social work policing model, seem ignorant of the second-order effects their plans will create. Then again, so what? Responsibility is, as ever, diffused. As for the lowly coppers tasked with delivering the impossible, such as delivering quality neighbourhood policing on shoestring budgets? They’re out of mind and sight, many miles from Marsham Street. And as for George Dixon? I doubt the Eighties-born Shabana Mahmood is aware of his fate. In The Blue Lamp, the film in which Pc Dixon originally appeared, the wise old copper was shot dead by a petty criminal. Even the BBC series, like the Home Office White Paper, is based on a ghostly policeman-who-never-was.
For The Telegraph, Guy Dampier says that reversing proposed reforms to indefinite leave to remain will simply force more draconian measures later.
Estimates suggest that in the next few years, around 1.6 million migrants could be eligible for indefinite leave to remain, as permanent residency is known. That will allow them access to public funds, like benefits and pensions. Most are low skilled and low paid, something which prior evidence shows is unlikely to change. Therefore, although predictions vary, they will end up costing the taxpayer billions over the course of their lifetimes. To tackle that, Labour is planning to shift the number of years of residency required to apply for permanent residency from five years to 10. Unspoken, is the hope that this shift will lead to their visas ending and these migrants choosing to go home…
Burnham knows that the British public remain furious about immigration. Although the number of illegal migrants has dropped this year, in no small part because tougher rules in Europe mean that fewer reach the French coast to begin with, there is still a huge backlog of asylum claims and asylum seekers in accommodation.
Similarly, legal immigration has dropped, but the gross number remains high, with more than 750,000 people coming to Britain one way or another. Pro-migration advocates want to argue that lower net migration means that there is no issue, but that misunderstands how immigration works. Even if flows have reduced, the stock of migrants who came here in the last few years is still very high. Only several years of low migration will reduce that.
Wonky Thinking
New analysis from the Centre for Policy Studies on the impact of increasing capital gains tax (CGT) has found that increasing the rate of CGT would reduce revenue rather than increase it, costing the Exchequer billions of pounds. Their research found that:
Hiking the higher rate of CGT by 10 points, according to official estimates, would lower revenue by £3.6 billion after three years. This is supported by other studies into real-world increases in CGT in other countries.
CGT is also overwhelmingly paid by a very few people: just 32,000 taxpayers account for 80% of CGT payments. This means that it is particularly vulnerable to those people deciding to leave the country.
There are more sensible proposals on the table for reforming CGT rather than purely raising it, not least by only taxing gains above inflation, or a given rate of return. But these would make the tax even more dependent on proceeds from a few wealthy individuals.
Even if the Treasury’s estimates are wrong, CGT is a relatively minor tax – raising just £24 billion, or 2% of all revenue – so there is little prospect of generating enough revenue from it to fill the holes in the Government’s balance sheet.
New research from the Centre for Social Justice has found that those British boys that do not follow the ‘Success Sequence’ (finishing education, getting a full-time job, getting married, and having children) are likely to suffer from financial and personal insecurity.
Their data has found that amongst British 28-34-year-olds, 87 per cent of those who completed education, entered employment and then got married were in the middle or top third of the household income distribution, almost identical to the US figures. Additional polling of over 2000 people, commissioned for this report, showed a similar result. It found that for men who followed the Success Sequence, 69 per cent described themselves as on stable financial footing versus just 28 per cent for those with no coherent sequence. The report says that we need to do more to promote the ‘Success Sequence’:
In essence, the Success Sequence is about giving boys and young men a positive social script. Boys need fewer lectures about restrictive behaviour and negative masculinity, and more guidance about what a good and stable life could look like. The sequence is also incredibly appealing because it is grounded in data. It gives boys a vision of what their future could look like and how they can achieve it, with the importance of work and stable relationships embedded within it.
We do not claim that this is a panacea to boys’ woes, or the only way to cultivate ‘positive masculinity’. But it is a start. We urge others who share our aim – those longing to help boys thrive – to either get behind this or offer a viable alternative: something that offers boys hope, guidance, and purpose. The gauntlet has been thrown.
Podcast of the Week
As the country prepares for a change in Prime Minister, on The Politics Show, The New Statesman’s Editor Tom McTague and Political Editor, Ailbhe Rea, discuss what the future may hold for the government and the critical battle for who will control the country’s economic policy: Shabana Mahmood or Ed Miliband.
Quick Links
A PhD student was frozen out of university for introducing Roger Scruton into a seminar.
Our trade deficit increased by £5.2bn in the first quarter of 2026.
The IMF warns the UK to be ‘very selective’ about any new spending.
Communist China attacks the government for nationalising British Steel.
Japan relaxes the imperial succession rule but still prevents women from becoming Emperor.
The High Court has overturned Natural England’s crackdown on pheasant shooting.
Every region outside the South England operates Greek-crisis levels of fiscal deficits.